On Christmas day 1534 an Act came into effect which finally brought to an end the privileged position that the alien members of the book trade had occupied since 1484. Immigrant binders who had made an invaluable contribution to English binding and tool design and who had even left their mark on the way books were constructed were gradually prevented by ever more repressive regulations from carrying out their business freely and the importation for the purpose of re-sale of books bound abroad, hitherto such an enriching feature of the English book trade, was forbidden.

The incorporation of the Stationers’ Company in 1557 virtually closed the book trade to foreign competition and made the position of a foreign craftsman who was not a denizen practically untenable. Nevertheless, as we shall see, foreign influences on binding and book design continued and a number of French Huguenot immigrants worked in London as bookbinders, and indeed so successfully that in 1578 the native binders demanded that no work should be given to ‘forens or strangers’ and that ‘ffrenchmen and straungers beinge Denizens maie not haue excessiue nomber of app[re]ntic[es]’. It is striking that, notwithstanding all attempts by the Stationers’ Company and by the native members of the trade to keep foreign competition firmly under control, the most successful and most beautifully decorated bookbindings produced during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I were either made by French Huguenot immigrants or much influenced by French taste in design, while even the period after the Restoration, the golden age of English decorated bookbinding, owes a certain amount to those decorative techniques and styles that were the prevailing fashion in France several decades earlier.